Berhe, O. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2026

Multimodal longitudinal prediction of alcohol-use trajectories in adolescents and young adults: Social context, real-life social affective benefit, and fronto-striatal involvement

Escalating alcohol use during adolescence and young adulthood confers substantial risk for later substance misuse and adverse mental health outcomes, yet the factors that determine early drinking trajectories remain poorly understood. Here, we examined alcohol use across social, affective, and neural domains in a cohort of 378 community-based young drinkers using a combination of longitudinal phenotyping, ecological momentary assessment (EMA) and functional neuroimaging. Across different levels of analysis, higher baseline alcohol consumption (standard drinks per week) was associated with immediate substance-use social context, greater social-affective benefit in daily life, and heightened engagement of the fronto-striatal reward circuitry. In a one-year longitudinal follow-up, individual social-affective benefit and substance-related social environmental factors showed the strongest predictive value for drinking trajectories in a follow-up of 219 individuals after one year. Our findings identify key social and neural reward-related determinants of youth drinking behavior, informing the development of evidence-based risk detection and prevention measures.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

EEG-fMRI reveals rapid representation of personal relevance of faces in social cognition and reward-related brain regions

The faces of those most personally relevant to us are our primary source of social information, making their timely perception a priority. Recent research indicates that gender, age and identity of faces can be decoded from EEG/MEG data within 100ms. Yet the time course and neural circuitry involved in representing the personal relevance of faces remain unknown. We applied simultaneous EEG-fMRI to examine neural responses to emotional faces of female participants romantic partners, friends, and a stranger. Combining EEG and fMRI in cross-modal representational similarity analyses, we provide evidence that representations of personal relevance start prior to structural encoding at 100ms, with correlated representations in visual cortex, but also in prefrontal and midline regions involved in value representation, and monitoring and recall of self-relevant information. Our results add to an emerging body of research that suggests that models of face perception need to be updated to account for rapid detection of personal relevance in cortical circuitry beyond the core face processing network.

neuroscience↗